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Home Sweet Silo

· Aerospace & Astronautics

Last year I traveled continuously from mid-May to early November, not to mention a couple other months on the road earlier that year. One of the trips was to Wyoming in July and while there Jim Bennett and I visited Frontier Astronautics rather unique home office.

Wyoming road
Jim and I drove for a long time.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Frontier Astronautics sign
We found their sign miles down a back road off a County road.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Jim Bennett rings the doorbell
After a ‘short’ drive up their private road we arrived at the main gate where Jim rang the door bell.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Frontier Astronautics silo door
Two engineers came out and led us on the trek to the bunker doors. They are large enough to pass an Atlas missile on a truck.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Indoor Flame trench
Back in perhaps 1962 the bunker center section held a liquid fueled Atlas ICBM. This is the flame trench that would be underneath the ICBM. The sections of the bunker to the left and right contained the fuel and oxidizer tanks used to fuel it. The center section is now (probably) the world’s only indoor engine test stand. Interior walls are 30 inch thick reinforced concrete: this allows the engineers and their monitoring gear to sit mere feet away from a firing engine.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Frontier Astronautics sign
The office also has a sun roof… These many, many ton reinforced concrete doors were built to slide to either side so the Atlas could be raised into firing position.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Frontier Astronautics engineers
Speaking of the engineers, here are the two who gave us the grand tour.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Tunnel to the flat
This is the tunnel to what was once a control room. The consoles are long gone and it now contains a modern flat where the owner, a former Titan IV engineer, and his wife live.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Home Sweet Silot
It is without a doubt the only family home with an indoor rocket engine test stand.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
February 1st, 2008 |

10 comments to Home Sweet Silo

  • Perry de Havilland
    February 1, 2008 at 6:48 pm

    Okay now THAT is a seriously cool place to have an office!!!

  • stpeter
    February 1, 2008 at 7:45 pm

    Speaking of repurposed cold war infrastructure, here is the data center where my organization has its server machines: http://usshc.com/

  • Dale Amon
    February 2, 2008 at 12:08 am

    Off topic for this article. Any further discussion of non-Space politics will be removed DB. You’ll have to wait for my next political post. Sorry.

  • Jacob
    February 2, 2008 at 7:11 am

    Dale,
    What do they do ? You’ve written about the “where” but not about the things they do, that you saw there.

  • mike
    February 2, 2008 at 9:07 am

    They live there Jacob!

  • Dale Amon
    February 2, 2008 at 10:23 am

    They design and test rocket engines and reaction control systems. I believe they also will rent out the use of their test stand but do not take my word for it.

  • Robert Racansky
    February 3, 2008 at 6:54 pm

    You can read more about Frontier Astronautics and its founder at http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_4809144

    Missile silo is gateway to final frontier
    By Al Lewis
    Denver Post Staff Columnist
    2/10/2006

    Chugwater, Wyo.

    Timothy Bendel often stamps “RKBA” on his work. It’s an acronym for the Second Amendment “Right to Keep and Bear Arms.”

    “When you have the right to own and carry guns, you have all your other rights,” he explains.

    America is a great country. Here, Bendel is not only free to carry guns, but free to own an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile silo. He bought it on the Internet in March for less than $400,000, and recently gave me a tour. Built in 1960, it was on alert during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was decommissioned in 1965 as more advanced missiles came on line.

    Bendel lives here with his wife in the former officers’ quarters, 20 feet beneath the windswept plains northwest of Cheyenne. Bendel also works here with three partners in 15,000 square feet of reinforced concrete that once housed an Atlas-E missile with a nuclear warhead.

    At 37, Bendel is through with his job at Lockheed Martin near Denver. For the past 18 months, he and his partners have been building and testing their own rocket engines and guidance systems.

    They are pioneers in the new space race – a race run by wealthy entrepreneurs and maverick engineers instead of the government. They call their company Frontier Astronautics.

    “For the first time in history, there is no frontier,” says Bendel, a stocky outdoorsman. “If we’re going to have any semblance of liberty … we need a frontier. If we keep cramming more and more people on the same planet, people will stick their noses in everyone else’s business, and we will have less freedom as everything is regulated.”

    In 2001, Los Angeles investor Dennis Tito became the first space tourist, paying $20 million for a ride to the international space station. It was former communists who took him there. “The Russians right now are the only source for private launches (of orbital flights) into space – how ironic,” said Bendel.

    But not for long. In October 2004, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and aerospace designer Burt Rutan claimed the $10 million Ansari X Prize for their SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded craft to achieve manned spaceflight.

    Richard Branson’s Virgin Group has licensed the technology to establish Virgin Galactic, which hopes to begin commercial space flights for about $200,000 a seat in 2009. Virgin already has sold hundreds of reservations. This year’s Neiman Marcus catalog offers a trip for six on Virgin Galactic for $1.764 million.

    Suddenly there’s opportunity, even for small businesses, in space. In several states, including California, Florida, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Virginia, entrepreneurs have applied for licenses from the Federal Aviation Administration to establish spaceports. Bendel said he hopes to turn his missile silo into a spaceport, too. “This is the beginning of the free market for space travel,” he said.

    And if billionaires want to push the boundaries of space, they’ll need rocket engines and guidance systems, which Frontier Astronautics hopes to provide.

    The company has contracts with SpeedUp of Tehachapi, Calif., which is developing personal rocket-powered crafts, and Masten Space Systems of Mojave, Calif., which is developing launch vehicles that take off and land vertically.

    Bendel and another partner are already making a living from the company. He said they expect to have enough revenue to pay the other two partners for full-time work within a year. They hope to grow the business, one customer at a time, instead of turning to venture capital financing or going deep into debt. “We want to design things we think will be successful rather than what some business tycoon wants to design,” he said.

    Bendel, who received a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1997, said he seldom thinks about going into space himself. His goal is to make a contribution so that those who come after him will have access to the final frontier.

    His ancestors came to the New World to escape oppression. His descendants will go to space for the same reason.

    “If you want to live your life in a free way, you’ve got to get away from all this authority,” Bendel said. “Ultimately, you’ll need to get off the planet.”

    Video of Tim at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW1fbPrnc1U

  • Robert Racansky
    February 3, 2008 at 8:41 pm

    Missile silo is gateway to final frontier
    By Al Lewis
    Denver Post Staff Columnist
    2/10/2006

    D’oh! I somehow truncated the “1” when I copied-and-pasted the text above. The correct date of the article is 12/10/2006 (December 10, 2006), not 2/10/2006.

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